


Orchard

by ledbythreads



Category: Led Zeppelin, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Robert Plant - Fandom, Rock Music RPF
Genre: Age Difference, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Folklore, Human!Loki, Led Zeppelin References, Loki and Thor Are Not Related (Marvel), M/M, Old Man!Robert, POV Alternating, Rock Stars, Summer king/ Winter prince dynamic, Thorki - Freeform, bandfic, jimbert - Freeform, rockstar!loki
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:47:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27672902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ledbythreads/pseuds/ledbythreads
Summary: One summers night Robert Plant meets a young rockstar at an afterparty for Glastonbury festival. Loki's music career is in the ascendant but the rockbiz gossip is that he's about to crash and burn. Something about Loki fascinates Robert, too beautiful for his own good, like somebody else he still carries fire for.This fic is set in perhaps 2018 when Robert was touring. It is a continuation of thebookhunter's Serpent AU, where Loki is a rockstar and Thor is his estranged ex-lover. Just before their band Serpent went stratospheric, Loki split with Thor, who left for a life of obscurity. If you don't know the story or the MCU fandom then all you need to know is that Loki has made a reunion album with Thor and his old band, but his attempt to rekindle their relationship has gone terribly wrong.If you do know, this is six months after chapter 11.
Relationships: Robert Plant/ Loki Laufeyson
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	Orchard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thebookhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookhunter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Serpent](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7506325) by [thebookhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookhunter/pseuds/thebookhunter). 



He reminds him of Jimmy. They all do. This one though. Something fragile but unbroken in him. Obsidian knife.

Of course, his band is called Serpent. How could it not be?

One night he'd found himself looking for him on YouTube in a way that made his hands shake.

He'd closed the tab and opened the one for Jimmy.

_'On This Day I brought Robert a perfect summer apple to where he was lying in our bed._

_The apple was warm from the sun on the windowsill._

_As I cut into the apple, I said that kissing him was like biting into the fruit from the tree of knowledge_ '

It doesn't say that. It never will.

It's two weeks after Glastonbury and he's in Somerset for a little come-down party out near Wells. Loki had headlined the main stage, a surprise acoustic set, but Robert had been in Iceland. Still the same tendrils and threads of the music world twist round his ankles pulling him to the land of golden apples.

Finding out _he_ was a friend of Pearl's. It didn't mean anything. He wouldn't let it mean anything.

So here he is drinking cider out of a paper cup in some hippie fairyland garden party. Little marquees wreathed in honeysuckle. A candle lantern labyrinth. Fairy lights in the orchard.

The crowd is a mixture of men in elephant pants and men in un-ironic cardigans.

Women who are nymphs or road crew; and the people of indeterminate gender holding court like shamans of the future. They remind him of the beautiful people he would look for in California when they had those vast daylight gigs. Queer mermaids in the Ocean of faces. Robert remembers when calling someone queer was a death threat, but he gulps the feeling down.

His people.

His and Jimmy’s.

Nobody pays too much heed to the guy with the grey and gold mane in leather pants.

When they know who he is, and they mostly do, they just smile and keep on dancing.

It's getting late and the requests for him to sing are getting harder to refuse.

At the corner of his peripheral vision. Where Pearl's friends are sitting. _He's_ here.

He sees the midnight waterfall of his hair and it shocks him. The way it was the time in Copenhagen when he saw Vantablack.

The memories absorb so much light that he can't tell if the thing he is feeling is about the person standing there, or just the absence of light.

Loki

_Jimmy_

He turns away.

But he had forgotten. Loki is a singer too. He's walking to the makeshift stage with an acoustic guitar. Shushing his teasing friends.

Without the airbrushing he is more beautiful.

The unravelled sex and carcrash vibe he'd been giving off last year is gone.

He looks newborn.

He looks like the dawn before the sunrise.

He sits on the barstool and adjusts the mic stand. Practical hands with black glitter nails.

Those boots. Higher than Robert's heels ever were. But the glamour. He has toned it right down so that everyone in the room bends towards the intimacy of what he is doing.

Robert feels like Loki is going to sing for him alone. He knows everyone feels the same. It's enchanting.

"Uh. Thanks. Can you turn the reverb down just a little. Ok. Hi. So, I've been sober for a year and a day, and I want to sing you this. It means a lot to me. Being among friends"

Loki picks out the first chords. It sounds so different stripped back to just the melody. Robert remembers Jimmy playing it before he had found the words. Just watching his hands. Jimmy’s song calling the words from inside him, as it always had, like something that was inside him from the beginning.

_Oh yeah, here I am_

_I've been here since all the time began_

_Oh oh, I'm here and then_

_Go round and round and back again_

His voice is different than Robert's own. Better trained, better protected, and a little lower.

Loki has that break in it. That torch song. That warmth that's heart-breaking like Anoni Johnson maybe. But all his own.

Hearing him in this tent with the PA you'd have for the local pub!

Everything stripped away but the bones.

Robert is fighting back tears because he doesn't want anyone to think he's feeling nostalgia when he is feeling awe. When the song ends, he applauds but keeps his eyes lowered. Nobody here will bother the old man in his reverie. But when Loki is standing there Robert realises, he wants to look him in the eyes.

And Loki's eyes are asking.

And his own are answering.

And it's like when Jimmy would look over his shoulder to call him to the same car. And he feels like he is nineteen years old. And he follows him. Follows Loki into the night.

And doesn't care that all those other eyes watch him go.

Loki takes the winding path to the orchard. Doesn’t need to look back to know Robert is following. Sober, on his meds, but the advice about avoiding reckless actions feels so much harder to obey _. ‘Because you feel something does not mean you need act on it. Just observe your feeling and let it go’_. He cannot let him go. 

Robert looks like Thor will look one day. Loki wants to be there to see it. To see the grey in Thor’s beard. Realising this was the first thing that made him want to live a slower life. Loki knows the stories, about how Robert turned his back on the crown to live his wandering life. Thor left. Loki hadn’t meant him to. 

The smell of apples in the dark. Each tree in its own circle of light. The grass crushed beneath them from the revellers who had sat beneath their shade in the sunshine. Now under moonlight, each a fairy ring. The sound from the marquee is fading but he can hear someone singing like Grace Slick 

Your eyes, I say your eyes may look like his

Yeah, but in your head, baby

I'm afraid you don't know where it is

Don't you want somebody to love

Don't you need somebody to love

Does Robert still think of him? Of Jimmy? He sings as though he does. He’s here with Loki. The summer king to his winter prince. It does not feel to Loki like he is the first man Robert has ever followed. It had felt like something familiar. Time for truth then. They have nearly reached the oak tree at the centre. The branches hung with the decorations they call gods eyes, with little lanterns, and wishing ribbons. Small carved figures of the goddess and the horned gods. Loki likes the gentle things the pagans make, so much more innocent than the magic of rock music. He reaches up and takes an apple from its tree. On tour weeks can go past without him touching something that is actually growing from the earth. He turns and offers the apple to Robert. 

“Sire” He bows slightly looking at him from under his lashes.

Robert blinks and then takes the apple. 

“My Lord”

He returns the bow. 

That smile is real. It takes Loki’s breath away. As Robert bites into the apple Loki sees the crows-feet and the lines of his face. His open throat as he swallows. The way he still stands like a god, although a very humble one. He knows then it is not just heartsickness that made him call to Robert. 

Loki reaches out and Robert comes, reaching up a hand to cup his hair at the nape of his neck as he pulls him close. Robert lets the apple fall.

Loki’s serpent tattoo pulses beneath Robert’s touch. As they kiss Loki hears whispers of Robert singing _‘baby baby baby’_ echoing to Jimmy’s guitar, and all the fight goes out of him momentarily. He feels like he’s being lulled, cradled. Robert is stroking his hair. Holding him upright. _‘Little girl, little girl_.’

Robert slides his hands up under the green silk of Loki’s shirt. There. Robert finds the fine body chains Loki is wearing and his breath catches like the first flames licking along kindling made from last year’s wood. Loki deepens their kiss in return as though awakening in pieces, as Robert’s hands discover new parts of his body. Loki reaches out and unbuttons down Robert’s chest. Not sure enough of him yet to just rip the thing undone.

At last, his hands on skin. On the pelt and heft of him. On the muscles, now softer than his own, like the butter smooth leather of something very finely made. Robert is giving to him, holding him, adoring him. As though he is giving him life. So, Loki takes it. Takes what he needs. Maybe Robert understands that some of Loki’s wounds can only be salved by someone who has been broken by the same song. 

Robert has had younger lovers, but none who has worn a crown like Loki’s. The crown that Robert has let fall. Although Robert thinks he can feel the places that fame has changed him, made Loki who he is right now, Robert thinks he can feel something in Loki that was perhaps always there, or rather _not_ there. Something yearning. Loki gives himself up into Robert’s touch like he is giving away the idea of himself. Another part of him watches from high above. _In clouds at icy altitude…_

The night smells of the mist that drifts in from the peatlands around them. Even before the Romans came here the people were laying secret roadways of oak just under the surface of the waters. If you wanted to survive here and cross over safely, you needed a guide. Robert isn’t sure if he can show Loki how to be who he needs to be, but he will share what he knows. If Loki will let him. Too beautiful for his own good. Loki uses his own body like a shield. Robert steps back, making space, pulling Loki with him until his back is against the tree and Loki can pin him there. The gods eyes twinkle in the lantern light but Loki’s eyes are shaded as he drops to his knees.

The bottom falls out of Robert’s vision and he feels inverted in time. Hung from the world tree and feeling all the pain of fifty years. He misses him so much, unbearably. He has poured it all into the music and made something beautiful, again and again, and now here he is undone by the mock submission of another prince of cool. He could let this happen. Let Loki kill the king of his own fantasies. Let Loki take him and break him and walk away triumphant. Winter king in Avalon, the horned moon for his diadem. Robert knows it will be some of the best sex of his life. If only he can shut his eyes and let it happen. Let Loki be his Jimmy for him. Reborn to him more beautiful and more sorrowful than before. A falling angel with his hands on Robert’s belt. 

“Loki”

The first time he has said his name, even to himself. Robert drops to his knees, so they are like twin supplicants before the tree itself. A god on his knees is still a god. Loki’s eyes are shaded by his hair, but Robert sees his knuckles whiten as he digs his fingertips into the turf. So. His back will not bend and so he must break, time after time.

“Sweet thing…”

It’s a wish as much as an endearment. Robert doesn’t know why he’s said it. Nothing about Loki is sweet. He goes about seduction like he’s destroying worlds.

But he’s just a kid. Setting himself on fire because he looks good in the flames.

“Loki”

Calling to him softly. Robert takes Loki by the shoulders and folds him into his lap.

“I need to slow down honey, that’s all. You could probably kill me and then bring me back from the dead, but I’ve got all night... I mean, think of the headlines.”

Loki sighs out but there’s maybe a laugh in it. Maybe.

It is so long since anyone has just held him that it feels unbearable to Loki, at first.

Every other lover must tame him, must give him something to kick against, must provide for him an elaborate trap. Robert just calls him honey, puts a hand into his hair, and Loki wants to lick his wrist. Wants to suck his cock.

Robert wants him too, so why are they?

What are they?

So good.

So good

Loki’s treacherous body, his soft animal body, wants this.

The scritch of Robert’s beard against his hairline. The heft and the sinew of him.

Holding.

Rocking.

Humming.

Van Morrison’s voice in Loki’s head twining through the low sound in Robert’s chest.

 _On a bluer ocean  
Against tomorrow's sky  
And I will never grow so old again  
And I will walk and talk  
In gardens all wet with rain_  
  
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing  
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing

Sandalwood and grass and leather and honey honey honey.

Soothing Loki’s edges. Warming him up like…

Like feeling Thor’s heat still on the morning after sheets, when every morning was their morning after. When it didn’t matter that he wasn’t lying there, when Loki only needed to call to him. But why would he call when Thor would soon be back of his own accord. His own sun, slipping into their bed, and flowing over Loki like light over still water. 

“Do you miss him, Robert?”

Robert’s humming stops but his hands don’t miss a beat. Soothing.

Strong hands. Words now

_…will raise my hand up  
Into the night time sky  
And count the stars  
That's shining in your eyes  
Just to dig it all an' not to wonder  
That's just fine, so fine, so fine,  
And I'll be satisfied  
Not to read in between the lines…_

Robert lets the lines hang in the darkness.

“I like to be lonely sometimes. I like to feel my feelings. I like this… I like… you.”

Loki reaches up and Robert’s kiss is waiting in the air for him like a dream. For a while he forgets Thor. Forgets the ceaseless roar of his own mind. Forgets to be Loki.

Robert whispers into their kiss

“You reminded me of… someone. But I want you, Loki. Ask me…”

“Take me to bed old man. Or do you need me to carry you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Lyric credits:
> 
> When The World Was Young | 1999 | Walking Into Clarksdale - Page and Plant | Page, Plant, Jones, Lee  
> Somebody To Love | 1965| The Great Society; (later) Jefferson Airplane| Darby Slick  
> Amelia | 1976 | Hejra - Joni Mitchell | Joni Mitchell  
> Sweet Thing | 1968 | Astral Weeks - Van Morrison | Van Morrison
> 
> Sooooo - This fic came from my cahooting with beloved co-creator incredifishface / thebookhunter. When we found each other in Led Zeppelin fandom I read all her old fic in Thorki fandom. I love her human AUs best of all and many of them are set in performance work of some kind. Loki is not Jimmy and Thor is not Robert - but they knit together in the roots of the world tree in some ways - Page and Plant having managed to borrow a little godhead for their fame personas which I use in making RPF. I guess this is a story about love and fame and how one can fuck up the other - or not - so the final chapter is not yet written for either of these True Love pairings. The third season of Page/Plant has been outstanding recently though I must say - with a whole lotta love, Mx L B Threads esq. 22 November 2020. 
> 
> ps - Loki's friend Pearl is based on Pearl Thompson also Porl Thompson, who was guitarist with Page Plant after leaving The Cure. As best I am able to determine Pearl or Porl are both his names and he uses he/him pronouns and is genderqueer. Thompson, who is also a visual artist, is retired from rock music.


End file.
